EPI News—Our most important stories this week

In February, the Working Families Flexibility Act was introduced; this legislation would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow private-sector employers to get out of the requirement to pay overtime and instead give hourly employees comp time. In a newpolicy memo, EPI's Ross Eisenbrey and Celine McNicholas explain that the bill does not give working families more flexibility—it simply lets employers delay paying any wages for overtime work for as long as 13 months.

Share this policy memo:Overtime already protects working people more than comp time would.

Investment advisers are bilking Americans out of $46 million a day because the Department of Labor has delayed implementation of the fiduciary rule, which requires financial advisers to work in their clients' best interests. The Trump administration wants to reexamine and possibly kill the rule. EPI's Heidi Shierholz notes that the only beneficiary of delaying or killing the fiduciary rule is the financial industry. She urges people to submit public comments to the Department of Labor to tell the Trump administration to side with working people rather than with the finance industry.

EPI's Daniel Costa analyzes the major flaws in the H-1B guest-worker visa program and describes the reforms needed to stop abuse of the H-1B system by unscrupulous employers. The biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B program, says Costa, are outsourcing companies that have hijacked the system—using between one-third and one-half of the visas—to replace thousands of U.S. workers with much-lower-paid H-1B workers while also sending tech jobs abroad.

April 4th was Equal Pay Day, a reminder that a significant pay gap still exists between men and women in our country. Equal Pay Day is April 4th because it marks when a typical woman's earnings catch up to what a man earned in the previous year. A new Economic Snapshot shows that, on average in 2016, women were paid 22 percent less than men, even after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, experience, and location.

Vox featured a chart with EPI data showing that "median wages for white women at $17.70 an hour have now outpaced those of all black and Hispanic workers," but "all women still lag far behind white men, who made $21.86 in median wages last year." | The gender and racial wage gap, in one chart »

NBC News interviewed EPI's Elise Gould about the gender pay gap: "At the bottom, there's just so far down women's wages can go. They are protected by some degree by the minimum wage," said Gould. "But as you move up, women are not occupying places at the top the way men are. The wage gap at the top is much larger." | Trump pulls back Obama-era protections for women workers »